Shipwrecked
by LoveFromAzkaban
Summary: For three years Butler has been waiting for Artemis to return from Limbo, and every single night he has nightmares.


This is my first AF fanfic. Please review! :D

Also, this _could _be interpreted as slash, if you want. It's not meant to be, but if you ship it like my friend does, then you might be able to make something out of it.

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_ But does anything matter if you're already dead?_  
_ And should I be shocked now by the last thing you said?_  
_ Before I pull this trigger,_  
_ Your eyes vacant and stained..._  
_ And in saying you loved me,_  
_ Made things harder at best,_  
_ And these words changing nothing_  
_ As your body remains,_  
_ And there's no room in this hell, _  
_ There's no room in the next,_  
_ But does anyone notice there's a corpse in this bed?_

There was a sapphire ring hanging from a hook on the door, and it had been haunting him for years.

The radiance of the pure, glittering blue contrasted with everything else in the cottage, from the rust flaked chain it hung from, to the faded white bed sheets and furniture coverings that covered everything like ghosts, to the sea that crashed against the rocks outside the door, gray and cold and unrelenting, just like his dreams.

When the morning sun came through the blinds, the facets winked and shimmered, and even when night fell and all was dark and he was up to his neck in blankets and coverings, clutching a rifle like a child would clutch a teddy bear, his eyes staring wildly in the dark, it stared at him like an eye, and he stared back at it, panic creeping up like a spider.

He's never coming back, he's never coming back.

A beetle scuttled along the ceiling and in his panicked state, he shot at it, firing a hole right through the plaster of the roof. It crumbled down like snow and the night air poured in, sharp with the smell of salt off the sea

He could feel sleep tugging at the edges of his vision, dragging him down into the mattress with vice like hands. He looked to the ring on the door, anguish seizing his chest with a cold fist as he cried out,_ "Come back"_ before sinking down.

In his dreams, it was always the same.

He was back in Taipei 101, staring across the distance. His principal was shouting to him but he couldn't hear the words over the roaring wind. Everything shudders and breaks into fractions of moments in which he has perfect clarity of little things; Artemis' dark hair tossed back by the wind, blue eyes big and wild in the pallor of his face, his teeth glinting like snow in the sunlight, his eyebrows furrowed with desperation. Butler wanted to surge forward and strike at anything that stood in his way, anything that stopped him from reaching his principal - but he couldn't move a muscle. The wind was pushing him back, screaming in his ears, dragging at his skin like fingernails.

_I'll come back. I'll bring them all back._

Then suddenly the dream shifts like a gear had turned, and all the fragments fall away into blackness like broken glass falling into a void. The world wheels around and suddenly Butler is lying in some strange dark place with just one window, staring into deadened sapphire eyes by his side.

_Artemis, _Butler thinks with a jolt. He tried to speak out loud, _Artemis, you're here -__  
_The boy's mouth was split and red, his lips parted to show blood stained teeth. He was shivering, arms drawn around himself in the chill, his knuckles bruised and bloodied. Butler is reaching for him instantly.

"Who did this to you?" he demands, taking the boy's small hands into his large own. His muscles were tensed and he was prepared and eager to rain fury down on whoever had put him through this pain. "Artemis?"

Artemis flinches at the touch but shows no signs of recognition, his eyes never meeting Butler's own, only staring into the dark, cavernous space overhead as if he could see something there. "Artemis."

He places a hand to the side of Artemis' face, cupping his cheek in his hand. His skin is cold and damp.

_"_You'll be alright. I've got you. You're alright." He gathers Artemis' into his arms and stands, the shadows shifting around him. Artemis is light as a feather in his arms, as if he's not even there at all. His limbs spill over in Butler's embrace and glow pale in the moonlight like phantoms. "It's alright. I've got you. I've got you."

A door appears and Butler rushes through it, desperate to bring Artemis to safety.

But when he steps through it, he's standing in the sand, a dazzling white sun blinding his eyes. Everywhere he looks, there's sand, tugging at his ankles when he tries to walk, stinging in his eyes in the howling wind. Tall dunes loom overhead, the violent wind shredding through them, carrying pellets of sand as sharp as glass.

He feels as if he's in the valley of death. The only way he'll be able to see anything is if he climbs to the top of one of the dunes to get a better look.

He reluctantly sets Artemis down on the ground.

"You'll have to wait here for a moment, Artemis. I promise I'll be right back in just a minute. Wait here. Don't move. I'll be right back."

He shrugs off his jacket and drapes it over the boy, shielding his eyes from the sand and sun. He has to force himself to let go of the boy, one finger at a time, and even as he steps away and starts scrambling up the dune, he repeatedly looks back over his shoulder at his principal on the ground.

Handfuls of sand fall away as he climbs, dusting his hair and embedding itself under his nails. He squints against the blinding white disc of the sun and forces himself to carry on. But when he reaches the top and gets to his feet and looks around, there's nothing to see. No water, no people, no buildings, no trees. The sand carries on for miles, each dune looking just the same as the other. With a jolt of panic, he turns around and runs back down the slope to where he left his principal.

But when he reaches the spot where Artemis should have laid, there was nothing there.

"Artemis!" he cries out in alarm, circling the spot. "Artemis, where did you go?"

Something catches his eye near his feet. Caked in layer of sand, there seems to be a strip of fabric fluttering in the wind. Butler drops to his knees and grabs it, and tugs and tugs until it breaks free from the ground and lands beside him. As he lifts it up, he realizes it's his jacket.

The jacket he left on Artemis.

Buried three feet under the sand.

"No!" he cried out. "Artemis, hold on, I'm coming for you, I'll get you out-"

He digs his nails into the sand and claws. His whole body screams in protest, his underused muscles straining with the effort of digging, his nails bloodied and raw. He doesn't pause to wipe the sweat from his brow or to shield his eyes from the sun. His breaths come in short pants, his arms shaking as he forces himself to keep going.

At long last, he feels something hard under his hands. He brushes away the last of the sand and reaches down.

But when his hands come away, he cries out in anguish and staggers back. Beneath him there's a shipwreck of bones, bleached by the sun and wind. His heart is racing, the blood roaring in his ears.

"No!" he cries, shaking his head.

He closes his eyes but he can still see the sight behind his lids, branded into his mind's eye with hot pokers.

When he opens them again, he's lying in bed. The room shifts into place as if it fell from the sky and was rattling upon impact. The blankets are damp beneath him from the air off the ocean. But he isn't alone in the bed.

He rolls over and, lying on his pillow, facing him with a smile, was Artemis.

"Hello, old friend," Artemis said blithely.

For a moment his spirits soar. Artemis! A smile graces his face for the first time in years.

But then Butler's heart wrenches, wrung out like a wet dishrag, because he suddenly realizes that this a dream. This was how it went, this was how it always went. He knows that this is a dream, firstly because he remembers he's had it so many times before, and secondly because in the real, waking world, Artemis would never get into his bed. There were too many implications with that.

Of course this was a dream. The same old dream that always haunted him.

He dreams of other things sometimes. It's usually this one, with Artemis in his bed, but there are other things, too, that plague him at night - the sounds of chattering teeth and cries for help from across a void, a great black pit that opens in the ground and threatens to swallow him. He dreams of blue eyes and grinning vampire teeth and a soft lilting voice, small fists clutching at his shirt in the dark, frantic tugs and pleading whispers. His name chases him around in his mind, turning on the lights in every dark part of his head, pulling the sheets off every secret. Artemis, Artemis, Artemis.

"You're not really here," Butler blurts out. "It's not really you."

"Of course I'm not. I am what Artemis would refer to as your subconscious," he says in a perfect imitation of Artemis' condescending tone. He rests his chin in his hand and looks up to the hole in the ceiling where the starlight was pouring through, with a perfect replica of Artemis' thoughtful expression. "You've really let yourself go, Domovoi."

Butler almost laughs.

"To think, you're here in this shack, getting old and worn out, playing chess with a lovesick girl - the girl responsible for my disappearance, mind you - and reading books. While I'm missing."

"Artemis-"

"I'm gone, Butler. I'm gone," he says vehemently, his blue eyes narrowing with rage. His demeanor shifts instantly, his small hands balled into fists. "I'm _gone. _I'm missing!_ What are you doing?"_

"Artemis, I -"

"I _need _you."

The words pierce Butler's heart, his stoic expression that he usually keeps up even when alone cracks.

"I need you," the fake Artemis repeats, chipping away at Butler's stoic armor. He sensed a weak spot and was striking it, just as the real Artemis would. "I need you."

"Stop," Butler pleads, his voice cracking in a way he never thought possible from him.

"You don't even know what's happening to me right now. You don't even care."

"Of course I do! How could you say that?"

"You don't."

"I _do_."

"Oh, no you don't."

_"I do!"_ Butler insists angrily, sitting upright, looking down at the pale boy sprawled lazily across his bedsheets, with his dark hair fanning around his pillow, arms folded stubbornly like a child's, his blue eyes narrowed and accusing. "You're my life! You have been my life since the moment you were born! Every waking _and _sleeping moment of every day of my life is you, everything I do, everything I think, is you! What am I supposed to do without you? Did you think you could just disappear without leaving a gap where you used to be? There must have been some stupid scientific rule that occurred to you, some kind of Newton's Law, that you can't pull a brick from a foundation without collapsing the rest of the structure. You _must _have known!"

But the boy on his bed wasn't listening.

And he was right, Butler knew. Artemis did need him. Somewhere, across the vast expanse of time and space, Artemis' heart was beating. Maybe he was buried six feet under the ground on this day in this year, maybe his bones had long turned to ash thousands of years ago, swept along in the current of time - but at some point after he stepped out of that building in Taiwan - at some moment, he was alive and breathing.

And, for all Butler knew, was being subjected to all kinds of horrors and torture.

Needing him like a missing limb.

He would never even know what happened.

And how would he? If Artemis never reappeared until the day he died, he would never know what had happened. There was nothing he could do. He desperately wanted to search - sometimes he even shaved and put on his hunting boots and got out the old Sig Sauer and stepped out of the cottage to go looking, quite prepared to shoot anyone who stood in his way - and then he'd remember that there was nowhere to start.

Not even Minerva, who was probably the closest person to Artemis' level of intelligence, could make heads or tails of the calculations he'd left in a journal. She drew up her own, up and down blackboards and scraps of paper and even traced them in the sand along the water, but she could not fathom a way to open the door Artemis, Holly and Nº1 had shut behind them. If she could not, then how could he? How could he ever know where to begin? If there were a way, he'd go anywhere, do anything, stop at nothing, to find him. If he could, he'd strike at every enemy, at any person who harmed a hair on his cherished principal and lifelong friend's head.

But he couldn't. He couldn't even know.

"Arty," he whispered, the word piercing his heart like a dart in the silence and shattering the dream. He jolts awake but the scenery barely changes. His eyes flutter open and Artemis fades away, leaving him staring at the sapphire ring over the door. He can't remember why he put it there.

Though his body and mind were rapt and alert, vividly awake even in the dark hours of early morning, he can still remember bits and pieces of his dream, catches them flitting across his mind.

_I need you._

"He needs me," Butler said out loud.

His pulse suddenly started to quicken, an overwhelming sense of restlessness rolling over him. What was he doing just lying there? Artemis needed him. He got out of bed and rummaged through the drawer of his bedside table for the Sig Sauer and loaded it. Without any time to waste, he ran to the cottage door and flung it open, the early morning fog creeping in off the water, seeping into his bones. Down by the shore the sea pummeled the rocks, crashing and rolling back, churning like an upset stomach. It was still dark out, the stars still visible overhead. He looks up to them through the cloud of his breath and wonders if Artemis is up there somewhere, somehow, if he had been taken that far away.

It suddenly hits him that this is hopeless. He could never make it that far. He could never make it to where Artemis was.

If Artemis was by his side, the stars would be reachable, attainable, but without him they were nothing but dying beacons of light that his hands would never touch. He goes back inside and shuts the door and sits by the window, staring out at the sea and waiting.

It was in that moment that he was acutely aware that he was stranded there, shipwrecked like a boat on foreign shores, waiting for something he was sure would never come.

The following day there was an intruder in the cottage.

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Again I ask for you to please review! It encourages me to keep writing.


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